The Isengard Swim Team
by Grav
Summary: The reflexions of an uruk as inspired by a t-shirt I saw a picture of Bruce Hopkins wearing.


AN: Arómenë showed me her pictures from The Gathering last week, and I said "What does that t-shirt say?", and the story was born. Thanks to shirebound who, kind of inadvertently, pushed me out the door.  
  
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Well, that's not precisely true. I own some things, but none of the them Lord of the Rings.  
  
Rating: PG-13, because even though I have done this before, I get the feeling that one cannot write a story about Orcs without using some foul language.  
  
Summary: The reflexions of an uruk as inspired by a t-shirt I saw a picture of Bruce Hopkins wearing.  
  
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~The Isengard Swim Team~  
  
I used to hate it. Every morning, hours before the sun came up, that slobbering idiot Gracknish would blow his fecking horn to signal that it was time to get up and go. The other uruks, the ones that weren't special, got to sleep in until sunrise. There were days when I would have killed to be a berserker. Which, I am pretty sure is the point, so you'd think they would give me the damn job, wouldn't you?  
  
But no. Day after day, morning after frigid morning, I would wake, grunt for a bit, squeeze into those hideous trunks and head for the dam.  
  
I still remember, clear as anything, the day we were all lined up for inspection. Saruman himself came down the line, tall and iridescent and freaky in the fingernail department. Not that I am one to judge appearances mind, but still. . .  
  
Anyway, it was Career Day, and we all of us wanted to be berserkers. Sharkey would point at someone and intone "pike" or "bow" or "berserker", and then the orcs would parcel the newbie off for armour fittings and training camp. It went on for hours, there were ten thousand of us after all, and I was naturally at the very end of the line.  
  
The sun climbed higher and higher and we that were left got more and more miserable. What if Sharkey got enough berserkers, and we got stuck on the pike? Or worse, the bow? You can't kill someone decently with a bow. You're too far away and there's no blood to drink. Tensions ran rather high.  
  
Finally, he was close. We all began to jump and howl and wave our arms about in order to look our best as berserkers. But then Sharkey did something unexpected. All the while beforehand, he'd looked at each uruk individually. This time, he stood back so he could see us all at once.  
  
What a sight we must have been! There were about fifty of us, but we were so exhausted by this point that we couldn't jump anymore, so we howled and waved our arms around our heads. Still, we must have looked impressive, because Sharkey was nodding and smiling to himself. He ran one insanely long thumbnail through his beard and whispered something to his lieutenant, who in turn smiled evilly.  
  
We soon found out why.  
  
While the stable ones played with pikes, the sharp-eyed ones played with arrows and the crazy ones played with large blunt objects, we lifted weights and went for long runs. We built a dam so we would be able to train in the river. Sharkey quickly realized that the dam could operate a wheel which would give him more power in the mines. We all got new suits when he made that discovery, and it was only a bonus.  
  
The other uruks soon got tired of asking us what the hell we were doing all day. What were stories of weights and runs compared with "How to Stick a Man in 12 Obvious Places"? But still, we laboured. We got stronger and stronger, despite the miserably early mornings and frigid water. The others got armour, we got nice fluffy towels. Sharkey was still happy about the dam, and he didn't want us to get hypothermia. He handed out the towels himself, the uruks did the armour. I guess he thought there was less chance of breaking a nail.  
  
There was almost a riot when they told us that we weren't going to Helm's Deep. We'd been practicing holding our breath at depth so we could get to the culvert and pull it open for the rest of the army. As it turned out, the Worm told Sharkey that the drain was above the water, and Sharkey invented this fancy device to blow it sky-high and didn't need us anymore. I got the bends for nothing fishing keys off the bottom of our lake.  
  
So we stayed behind when all the lads went out to fight. They put a nice enough face on it for us, "Home Guard" we were called, but berserkers aren't known for their discretion and we could hear them giggling into their hauberks when they passed by us. And the boredom! It was incalculable. At least during training we had the stories of the others to look forward to at the end of the day. Now, it was just a damp silent barracks, although silence was preferable to that wretched song some of the lads composed and invented actions to. None of us could do a decent breast- stroke anyway, in or out of the water.  
  
Then, one bright morning, we heard an awful yell from the forest. We looked up, only to find that the trees were moving. More importantly, they were moving towards us. And they didn't look like they were coming for a nice tea and a tour of the warg pits. We knew it was no good to go to Sharkey, so we readied the defenses as best we could.  
  
Not that it did us the least bit of good.  
  
We might as well not have been there for all the Ents walked through us. They were after the machines mostly, although they weren't about killing any orc or uruk stupid enough to attack them. Most of the berserkers left for the Home Guard were killed right away. At last we heard one of them roar something about bringing the dam down.  
  
The lads and I knew what that meant: we might get out of here after all. As the water came crashing down, the Ents all became far more concerned with staying upright than with killing anything non-arboreal that might float by, and we made our escape.  
  
We swam across the pits and around the Tower, much aided by the current. In a few moments, we were over the wall and in the clear. We swam until we ran out of water, and then ran until the smoke of Isengard was just a spot in the distance. We stopped to make a plan, and decided to head further into the Misty Mountains. We'd heard there were lakes there, and that it was dark and cool.  
  
As we stood on the ridgeline, looking back at our ruined home, we had a moment of silence for our fallen leader and comrades. Then, we turned and headed north, away from mad trees, global wars and evil fingernails, to a place where we could continue our training in the hopes that someday, someone would make it applicable.  
  
We few, we happy few. We, the Isengard Swim Team.  
  
Maggots! I forgot my spare trunks.  
  
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AN: Yes, I'll even steal from Shakespeare. It's actually "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" and it's from Henry the Something-Or-Other. 


End file.
